Blog Share: DandilyonFluff - More Chicken Ban Business

Sent August 21, 2014. A letter from Nathan Boyles, the commissioner who thinks we are smart enough to care for a few chickens if we want to. I’m glad somebody up there has confidence in us!

I thought it was a simple issue but by the time it was over, I felt a bit like I had been boiled and plucked. I was trying to repeal the rule in Okaloosa County that outlaws backyard chickens – even a single hen- in all residential districts, rural or not. In truth though, the issue isn’t really about chickens at all. It is about being true to core principals. That means ending government interference into our lives – and our backyards, unless our individual actions harm our neighbors. I assumed, wrongly, that with an all Republican “conservative” Commission the issue would be a homerun. I noted a government ad from 1918 – near the end of World War 1 – encouraging Americans to keep backyard chickens to boost the productivity and self-reliance of a nation at war. The ad featured two children building a backyard chicken coop. The children represented the same generation that would later become “The Greatest Generation.” Those children, raised in a time when self-reliance and duty to the greater good existed in harmony, would face down the greatest threat the world has ever known. And yet less then 100 years later, it is okay for government to outlaw a former virtue... Read the rest at: http://dandilyonfluff.com/2014/08/more-chicken-business/